


Morbid Fascination

by StarlightXNightmare



Series: Alive Before Midnight; Dead by Daylight [2]
Category: Dead by Daylight (Video Game)
Genre: Conversations about Death, Dead animals, Gen, Gore, Graphic Depictions of Animal Corpses, Gross, bones - Freeform, decomposition, mentioned parental death, mentions of illnesses
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-17
Updated: 2019-12-24
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:13:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21826498
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StarlightXNightmare/pseuds/StarlightXNightmare
Summary: Compared to her friends, Susie's not as bad as them. But she isn't so innocent either. She has an obsession with bones and dead things.
Series: Alive Before Midnight; Dead by Daylight [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1546696
Comments: 2
Kudos: 11





	1. The Beginning of an Obsession

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Quiet_roar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quiet_roar/gifts).

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Susie learns about death and pokes a dead opossum.

Susie’s six and bored, her head resting against the glass of the car window and eyes lazily watching the scenery pass by. Something on the other side of the road catches her eye—a squirrel. It’s flat and there’s a dried dark spot around the small body.

“Mommy, why’s there a squirrel?” She asks quietly, trying to turn to see it as they pass by.

“Hm?”

“There’s a squirrel in the road.” She repeats. “Why?”

Her mother sighs, keeping her eyes ahead of her. “It’s dead, honey.”

“Dead?” Susie wrinkles her nose. “Like daddy?”

Her mother twitches. “Yes,” she snaps irritably. “It’s sleeping and it’ll never wake up.”

Susie tries to see the squirrel again but they’ve gone too far from the furry animal. 

“That’s sad,” she decided after a moment of debate. “Why do things die?”

Her mother sighs again. “Because that’s how the world works.”

“Oh, okay,” she said, nodding as if she understood. She didn’t really but mommy didn’t want to talk about it anymore, so she stayed quiet, thinking about squirrels in the road and her daddy who wouldn’t be coming back. 

* * *

Several weeks pass by and Susie’s largely forgotten about the incident—until she finds an unmoving opossum in her backyard.

“Hello?” She asked it, expecting it to get up and bolt. She pinches her nose closed when she smells the stench coming off of it, recoiling in disgust. “Ew, you smell,” she said to it, voice higher than usual with her nose pinched shut. She looks at it closer. “Are you dead?” It didn’t move. 

Susie crouched down next to it, using her free hand to poke the animal’s side. It didn’t move other than jolt when she prodded it, its side stiff and cold. She poked it again, harder. 

“Susie! What on earth are you doing!?” Her mother called.

She looked up, seeing her mom standing in the doorway of the back of the house. “I think it’s dead!” She announced, sounding pleased with her conclusion.

Her mother’s face morphed into horror and disgust, leaving the house to come closer. “Did you just touch it!?”

Susie nodded solemnly. “It wouldn’t move when I asked it if it was dead,” she said seriously.

“Susan Marie Johnson!” Her mother yelled, storming over, grabbing Susie by the wrist and yanking her to her feet. “You don’t touch dead things ever!” 

“Wha… why not?” She asked, trying to keep up with her mother as she marched her inside. They entered the kitchen, stopping at the sink.

“Because they can make you real sick! Sick as in die sick!” Her mom said, squirting several pumps of soap into Susie’s hand and turning on the faucet. “Wash up right now!”

Susie obeyed, scrubbing her hands together and watching suds form. She silently wondered if dead people felt like the opossum did. Next time she decided she’d poke the dead thing with a stick.


	2. The Start of a Collection

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Susie finds a bird skull.

Susie hums happily as she kicks a rock down the sidewalk, watching it skitter a few steps ahead before she sends it flying again. Her backpack straps rest on her shoulders and she clutches to them as she walked home from school. Her school is only ten minutes away from home by car and her mom is busy working, so Susie gets to walk home when it’s warm enough.

The small rock bounced as it struck a crack and disappeared into the grass to the right. She made a small noise of disappointment, stopping her journey to look for the pebble. A small, discolored white object catches her eye and she stoops down low to pick it up. She turns it over in her hands. It’s smooth to the touch and has two big holes in the front above the pointed nose, the white fragile and one thin part under the hole creaking as she held it a little too tight. She loosens her grip and puts it in the palm of her hand. Susie likens it to a bird head and realizes that the little object is a bird skull.

“Woah, cool,” she whispers, closing her fingers around the skull. She wonders where the rest of the skeleton is and searches in the nearby grass for it, a little disappointed when she finds nothing. She remembers her mother’s multiple warnings of contracting painful and deadly diseases when dead stuff get touched. Did bones count, too?

Susie decides she wants to keep the bird skull—it's cool and creepy. She unshoulders her bag and slips it into one of the side pockets meant for a water bottle, gaze lingering on the skull. Carefully maneuvering the bag back onto her back, she walks home with a spring in her step.

Susie unlocks the gate and relocks it behind her, beelining for the house. Mom wouldn't get home for another four hours, so she had time to find a good place to tuck the skull away. She tries to think of a good spot to keep her new friend—a place where her mom would never check. Susie knows if she puts it somewhere her mom would check, her mom would find it and throw it away and lecture her on the importance of hygiene. She didn't want her mom to throw the skull away—Susie found it and it's hers, not mom’s.

She examines every spot in her room, taking a keepsake box and clearing it out. Reverently placing the bird skull inside the box, she closes the lid and latches it shut. She determines no place in her room would be safe for the skull but takes the box along with her, careful of the precious cargo it now holds. 

There is one place her mom would never check: the shed near the edge of the woods. It used to be her dad’s workshop but nobody uses it now. It'd be the perfect place to store her new friend.

Susie pushes the door open, shining a flashlight around the dark space. The shelves have been long since cleared, few tools remaining with a rake and other long handle tools propped up in the corner of the shed. The shelves were too open to put the box but…

She trips over something on the ground, clutching the box tight as she lands on her elbows. Tears well up in her eyes at the painful throb and sting of wood on her skin and she sniffs. She wipes her eyes with the back of one hand, turning to see what made her fall. A floorboard is loose, partially wedged up and missing two nails. She sets the box down next to her, crawling closer to the floorboard.

Curiously, Susie pulls on the board, hearing it creak and groan as she tugged with all her might. It snaps free with a loud splintering crack, leaving behind a small part of wood where the two nails held it down. She drops the board and peers down into a small space between the wood and the dirt. Susie turns to pick up the small box and slots it in the hole with room to spare, puffing her chest out proudly and smiling at her success. This spot would work nicely.

She picks up the board and places it down where she pulled it up from, the only thing showing her hiding spot being a crack through the board near the end. She stands and puts her foot testingly on it, happy when it doesn’t shift too much. All it looks like is a plank that weathered too much weight.

Yes, she could fit many bones in that nook before she’d have to find a second space for them.


	3. Peeling and Rotting

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Susie finds a dead stray cat in the road and decides to make use of its body.

In seventh grade while walking home after a long day of school involving a project presentation, Susie found a dead cat in the street. Glancing left and right to check for both cars and people, she jogged nervously into the street and knelt down. She slid her free hand under the cat’s stiff body and lifted it up, holding it away from her as she speed walked to the sidewalk. She laid the cat in the grass and wiped her hand on her jeans.

The cat is a smaller breed and has dirty, short orange and white striped fur with white paws like little socks. It had no collar around its neck and there’s a dent in its side where a tire crushed it and its side is bloated. It reeks of death. Blood stains the white fur around the cat’s open mouth with red staining its canines, green eyes bugged wide and sightless. Susie wonders if it had seen the car coming—if it’d been scared to die.

“Poor kitty,” she murmured softly, stroking the cat’s fur as if she could comfort it. She pushed its mouth closed and dragged its eyelids shut over its bulging, swollen eyes. She wipes her hands on her jeans again. She glances around again but hesitates to leave. It felt wrong to leave the cat abandoned at the side of the road. 

A thought strikes her. She doesn’t have a cat skull yet, let alone a whole skeleton of anything. 

“I’ll make sure you’re remembered,” she says softly, setting her shoebox project down. She picked out the trinkets her project required and set them in her backpack. Susie lifts the cat up and sets it in the shoebox, rearranging its stiff limbs so it’d fit inside. She closes the lid and picks up the box, holding it close to her chest. 

“It’s okay, kitty—I love you,” Susie said. “You need a name,” she says, tracing the edge of the shoebox. “Something like… Cream or… I can’t think of anything else to call you. I’ll call you Cream for now. Is that okay?”

The cat doesn’t respond.

* * *

Susie places the shoebox several yards into the tree line, under the branches of an evergreen. She doesn’t want other animals getting to the poor kitty but it would make it faster to get the bones.

“I’ll come back to check on you every day,” she promises.

* * *

She decides to record the cat’s decomposition in a small, empty journal she’s never used. She tallies the date and the days that pass, observing how the cat’s body changes.

* * *

A few days pass, the stench of rot growing ever stronger. It gets to a point where Susie feels nauseous standing close to the cat for too long, nearly throwing up when she opens the box to get a wave of rank assaulting her senses. Though the stench implies something is happening, the cat’s body doesn’t change much other than the body’s bloat deflating, leaving the cat looking starved. Its eyes are forced open as they bulge further and its tongue swells and sticks out of its cracked open mouth.

* * *

A few weeks pass and when Susie opens the box, she sees maggots squirming underneath the skin of the cat, eating at the flesh. Clumps of fur are missing, having fallen out with the rest of the fur rotting with the flesh. The eyes are gone, rotted from its skull and its tongue is gone as well, ears absent and revealing two holes to the skull. Parts of the thin skin on its head have thinned to expose bone underneath. The tail is nothing but dried skin clinging to bone.

* * *

It takes a month or two but most of the flesh is finally gone. The box has fallen away and decomposed just like the cat, the maggots gone and turned into flies. 

* * *

Susie finds the latex gloves her mom keeps around and pulls a pair on, tying a pink bandana around her mouth before heading to the partial skeleton with a bag. She gathers up the bones and brings them to the yard, turning on the hose on low and letting the water dislodge the last of the remains off of the bones. She digs a shallow hole with a trowel and pushes the scraps into the hole with the metal tool before covering it up and washing it off with soap.

She dumped the bones in a container filled with a soapy water mixture and let it sit for about a week before dumping the greasy solution out and drying off the bones with an old rag. Then she pried up a different floorboard near the wall to stash away the entire skeleton.

“Your bones are very pretty, Cream,” Susie complimented, patting the floorboard above them. “I hope you’re happy wherever you are.”

**Author's Note:**

> Yo Quiet_roar, I like your Susie headcanon a whole lot and this idea popped into my head. Just a relatively short chapter fic around my take on Susie's interest in dead things and bone collecting.
> 
> My Tumblr main: kangaroo-roux  
> My horror blog: obumbrate-wailing


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